Building, Texts, and Contexts: Architecture’s Multiple Modernisms

Modernism is aligned with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events, new conceptualizations of their appearance, and changing event structures and temporalities. At the same time, these changing relationships between objects, their producers and maintainers, and their audiences and consumers were brought forth by the development of extractive projects that transformed human relations with the land and its constituents. A history of modern architecture, then, must involve a robust theory of the producing, using, viewing subject as well as of the object itself—which includes buildings and projects, texts and discourses, and the contexts of their production and reception. It also involves questioning the ways in which architecture spatializes technologies of extraction, means of production, and systems of power and domination. 

Specific features of the object—colonialism and the violence it enacts on lands and peoples; global capital markets and the rise of nationalism; lingering regimes of inequality; aspirations to universality and the entrenchment of local interests; in general, the contradictory conditions of the modern world—marked a fundamental change in the way its history could be conceived. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ideal of the universal subject of the European Enlightenment had been irrevocably fractured and contested as a fiction of empire. Similarly, former parameters outlining “proper” forms of art and architecture have been revealed as Eurocentric constructions that conceal the multiplicity of architectural production. Rather than constructing a singular historical narrative able to contain and make sense of these contradictions, this course traces multiple modernisms that arise to respond, enforce, or contest these regimes.  

This course will use theoretical texts and historical examples to generate ways of thinking about modern architecture not as a bygone era but as the inaugural frame for our own situation. Our question is not “How does modern architecture reflect the given conditions of modernity?” but rather, “How can architecture (as subject, as object, as technique) produce, impose, or resist those very conditions?’ 

In addition to the lectures, all students are required to attend a weekly one-hour discussion section. These sections will be held in one-hour blocks on Thursdays between 1 and 6pm, additional times on Fridays will be opened if needed. All sections will be scheduled at the start of the semester.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. The course will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 7th and will meet regularly thereafter.

The Idea of Environment

The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them to intervene—that is, to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, compels us to reconsider how we have imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed the environment. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.  

This class is a seminar focused on reading and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.

Theories of Landscape as Urbanism

This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. The course introduces students to landscape as a form of cultural production, as a mode of human subjectivity, as a medium of design, as a profession, and as an academic discipline. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.
 
The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20thcentury, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.
 
The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.
 
Course readings and supplementary multimedia materials are made available for asynchronous review via Canvas. Course meetings are bi-weekly with lectures Tuesdays 9:00-10:15 and Wednesdays 10:30-11:45. Weekly discussions sections are led by Teaching Fellows on Fridays 15:00-16:15 or 16:30-17:15. Students are invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete a design research dossier on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course is required for candidates in the Master in Landscape Architecture Program, is recommended for candidates in the Ecologies domain of the Master in Design Studies Program, and invites elective students from all programs and departments of the School.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets as a Tuesday, this course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 6th and will meet regularly thereafter.

Preparation for Independent Thesis Proposal for MUP, MAUD, or MLAUD

What does it take to complete a graduate thesis in the Department of Urban Planning and Design? The seminar introduces different types of theses that might be produced by students, whether textual, design-focused, or based in some other medium, such as film. It addresses topic and question identification, research methods, case selection, the craft of thesis production, managing the student-advisor relationship, and techniques for verbally defending a thesis.

Over the semester, students identify and refine their thesis topic, solidify their relationship with a thesis advisor, and produce a thesis proposal. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a solid thesis proposal and have the necessary intellectual foundation to complete their thesis by the end of the academic year.

Course meetings combine input from faculty, group discussions, progress reports by students, and reflections on next steps. The course will include a midterm and final review of students' proposals, to be attended by faculty and critics.

For Everyone a Garden: The Evolution of High-Rise Modular Housing Systems [1-unit, Module 2 course]

High density urban housing remains one of the puzzling unresolved issues of our time. Many experiments confuse issues of typology with those of construction methodologies. Many formal experiments appear to be detached from considerations of their impact of quality of life within the buildings.

In three lectures, each followed by a discussion, we will explore the evolution of High-Rise Modular Housing Systems in the past fifty years. We will first review the prevailing high-rise housing typologies, assessing their relative qualities and challenges. We will assess their environmental/quality of life issues inherent in these typologies, and discuss the attributes and particular features and characteristics that modular housing systems might effectively address: Scale, privacy, identity, community, climate adaptability, sustainability, creation of private and public outdoor spaces, etc.

Drawing on our projects of this period, both realized and unrealized, we will study a series of case studies, assessing their relative success in addressing this issue. We will survey experiments in load bearing modules, frame supported structures, deploying concrete, steel, timber and evaluate their industrialization potential, accommodation of open outdoor private and public spaces, stacking and massing possibilities.

Specifically, we will assess the impact of diverse housing typologies in their aggregate form on the public realm. Every distinct typology, no matter of which density, implies a particular concept of Urban Design. Mixed-use development greatly expands the possibility for the design of the public realm.

We will conclude by a study of the potential of mixed-use developments and its impact on the quality of housing as compared with single-use developments.

Finally, and to close out the series, we will invite course participants to the Safdie Architects studio in Somerville to see drawings, models and other artifacts from the Safdie Archive, and to discuss the projects in detail with the firm’s Partners and in-house Processing Archivist team.

To receive credit, students will be required to attend each of 4 sessions.  After each lecture, there will be a discussion session. At the end of the course, students will prepare a paper.

This 1-unit course meets four times: March 22, March 29, April 12, and April 19. Attendance is required.

Equitable Development and Housing Policy in Urban Settings (at HKS)

An introduction to policymaking in American cities, focusing on economic, demographic, institutional, and political settings. It examines inclusive and equitable economic development and job growth in the context of metropolitan regions and the emerging "new economy.”  Topics include: federal, state, and local government strategies for expanding community economic development and affordable housing opportunities, equitable transit-oriented development and resiliency. Of special concern is the continuing spatial and racial isolation of low-income populations, especially minority populations, in central-city neighborhoods and how suburbanization of employment, reduction in low-skilled jobs, and racial discrimination combine to limit housing and employment opportunities. Current federal policy such as Opportunity Zones and tax credit initiatives will be examined relative to policy goals of addressing communities that have historically been discriminated both by the public and private sectors.  During the semester, students will complete a brief policy memorandum, and participate in a term-long group project exploring policy options to address an urban problem or issue for a specific city.

Jointly offered course: Also offered as SUP-600.

Check the HKS website for shopping period meetings.

Expository Cartography

Today’s cartographic convention, software, and methods of data harvesting all homogenize how designers approach and communicate through maps. Across practice and academia these forces produce torrents of site analyses and territorial plans that read like state-sanctioned data collages. Discerning analysis, temporal projection, and graphic experimentation are all subordinated by the machine process – download, visualize, format, print.

It’s a dreadful state for the endlessly imaginative field of cartography. But maps and geographic visualizations have the capacity to reveal invisible networks, articulate inequities, and produce new paradigms for representing relationships across space. Our ability to stimulate conversation across disciplines and with the public hinges upon a cartographic practice that preferences rigor, translation, and empathy.

Expository Cartography roots itself within this speculative and critical mode of practice. Adopting a journalistic ethic, students will leverage tools of GIS, data visualization, and 3D modeling to graphically narrate powerful stories about cities and landscapes in transition.

Several short projects will ask students to convey morphological, demographic, or environmental phenomena through single mediums such as Census data or Landsat imagery. The final term project invites students to design a new cartographic convention – a representational standard applicable across geography and time – using advanced geospatial workflows. Students will work in small groups and design through one of three methodologies: symbologies (inventing a new graphic language or notation), geometries (challenging the spatial boundaries we observe), or tactilities (employing analog drawing and modeling techniques).

The course meets weekly, with time spent between lectures and hands-on technical workshops. While no prior GIS knowledge is required, experience with Rhino and the Adobe Suite is expected, as is an aptitude for digital and analog drawing.

Competing Visions of Modernity in Japan

The course will trace the parallel trajectories of two of modern Japan’s most influential schools of architectural thought, represented by Tange Kenzō (1913–2005) on the one hand and Shinohara Kazuo (1925–2006) on the other, and situate their contributions in the broader development of international modernism in the postwar period. Tange and his protégés in the Metabolist group dazzled the world with radical proposals for urban communities built either on the sea or elevated in the sky. Shinohara rejected this techno-rationalist stance through the slogan “A house is a work of art” and turned to the single-family house shunned by the Metabolists. The House of White by Shinohara achieves an almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction and precision. The course will be structured as a series of discursive narratives and debates, such as tradition, transparency, lightness, and technology, which defined architectural practice and criticism in Japan after 1945. Major figures, notably Itō Toyoo, successfully overcame these differences and established new paradigms. We will also position young Japanese architects today, Ishigami, Fujimoto, and Hasegawa, in terms of these historical genealogies and the evolution of a critical discourse.

International Real Estate and Urban Developments

Real estate, in the international realm, is anchored at the intersection of economic activities, capital flows, and the spatial transformation of the environment. While different locales may entail distinct contextual elements embedded in real estate and design practices, fluid cross-border capital operation and increasingly connected institutional actors at the global scale constitute a formidable force in shaping and guiding the formation and operational mechanism of the built urban environment.

Through lectures, case studies, charrettes, and class discussions, this course provides students with knowledge and insights about the process and analytical frameworks of real estate development and investment from a comparative and trans-regional perspective. It begins by introducing institutional parameters that measure the comparative forces and disruptions framing the current landscapes of international real estate. And it then proceeds to examine analytical frameworks assessing the risks, opportunities, and performance of international real estate. The course concentrates on real estate practice models and emerging asset types that are deployed in selected locations of the world. Real estate financing strategies, institutional features, operational tactics, and physical design maneuvers of real estate projects located in countries and regions of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas are analyzed and interpreted through a lens of the decision-making process at the project and urban dimensions.

Designer Developer

Design and finance can both be understood as universal languages. Although architects, landscape architects, and planners are trained to produce and interpret design, it is becoming more and more necessary for them also to be conversant and sometimes fluent in finance to implement innovative design proposals. As building complexity and the sophistication of building needs, construction methods, and finance have increased, architects have progressively taken on less risk and abandoned more agency. This seminar will explore the designer-as-developer model: the potential to carve out more agency for designers in construction and development, and how design generates added value in real estate development.

The seminar will begin with lectures on the designer-as-developer model and discuss how the value of design can be quantified in the real estate development industry. The course will cover project and construction management, construction pricing, permitting and approval procedures, and basic financial structures for designer-developer projects. Lectures and tutorials will be given on basic financial modeling as required to complete the final project for the course. The seminar will review these topics through discussions based on real-world case studies. The seminar will incorporate case studies that examine how designer-developer projects were able to further design innovation while maintaining a handle on feasibility. Practitioners who have leveraged their background in design while working in the fields of Real Estate Development, Real Estate Investment, and Community Development will be invited to speak as guest lecturers to share their real-world experience as a designer-developer.

Designers often value design innovation and public impact, while most clients heavily weigh feasibility, schedule, and financial returns. By acting as both the designer and client, students will learn how to understand the values and risks of building in the 21st century. We will focus on a designer’s ability to imagine and bring progressive building ideas to market and discuss effective project and construction management. To reinforce the material discussed in class, students will be tasked with completing two assignments throughout the course. In the Case Study Assignment, students will be asked to identify and research a designer-developer project and present the deal points to the class. For the Group Project Proposal, using knowledge gained throughout the course, students will be expected to put forward a proposal for the designer-development initiated project. The final project may be of any scale or location, but must represent financial viability, have a design agenda, and identify potential risks and proposed mitigations in the process of bringing the project to market.

This seminar is aimed at equipping students with the knowledge and confidence to develop their own mission-aligned projects, whether they are market-rate projects or community benefit developments. Students will be exposed to the myriad considerations and processes that enable a building to be designed, approved, and built. They will learn to align their entrepreneurial aspirations with the pursuit of creating work that benefits a greater public. Design and finance are seldom discussed together due to the perception that they belong to two different phases of development. However, for developers, design is a powerful tool when underwriting a potential project. For designers, acknowledging the financial constraints and understanding precedents for economic opportunity can provide a sustainable foundation for design innovation.